a husband? Let us sometimes imagine
ourselves into the secrets of our wives' souls, and ask if they ever feel
that they are unequally and injuriously yoked in their deepest and best
life. Do we ever see a tear falling in secret, or hear a stolen sigh
heaved, or stumble on them at a stealthy prayer? A Roman lady on being
asked why she sometimes let a sob escape her and a tear fall, when she
had such a gentleman of breeding and rank and riches to her husband,
touched her slipper with her finger and said: "Is not that a well-made, a
neat, and a costly shoe? And yet you would not believe how it pinches
and pains me sometimes."

But some every whit as good women as Mercy was have purposed as nobly and
as firmly as Mercy did, and yet have wakened up, when it was too late, to
find that, with all their high ideals, and with all their prudence, their
husband is not in himself, and is not to them, what they at one time felt
sure he would be. Mercy had a sister named Bountiful, who made that
mistake and that dreadful discovery; and what Mercy had seen of married
life in her sister's house almost absolutely turned her against marriage
altogether. "The one thing certain," says Thomas Mozley in his chapter
on Ideal Wife and Husband, "is that both wife and husband are different
in the result from the expectation. Age, illness, an increasing family,
no family at all, household cares, want of means, isolation, incompatible
prejudices, quarrels, social difficulties, and such like, all tell on
married people, and make them far other than they once promised to be."
When that awakening comes there is only one solace, and women take to
that supreme solace much more often than men. And that solace, as you
all know, is true, if too late, religion. And even where true religion
has already been, there is still a deeper and a more inward religion
suited to the new experiences and the new needs of life. And if both
husband and wife in such a crisis truly betake themselves to Him who
gathereth the solitary into families, the result will be such a
remarriage of depth and tenderness, loyalty and mutual help, as their
early dreams never came within sight of. Not early love, not children,
not plenty of means, not all the best amenities of married life taken
together, will repair a marriage and keep a marriage in repair for one
moment like a living and an intense faith in God; a living and an intense
love to God; and then that faith in and lov